Narrator: Imagine you are a respected tribal elder in southern Afghanistan. You never supported the Taliban. When the Americans arrived after 9/11, you saw a chance for a new beginning. You rallied your community, surrendered weapons, and embraced the new government. Then, one night, the soldiers you welcomed storm your home. They humiliate your family, beat your sons, and kill you. Your community’s hope turns to rage. The question is, why? Why would the world’s most powerful military, in its quest to defeat its enemies, end up destroying its own allies?

This deeply unsettling question is at the heart of Anand Gopal’s investigative masterpiece, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes. The book dismantles the simplistic narratives of the War on Terror by revealing how America’s fundamental misunderstanding of Afghanistan didn’t just prolong the conflict—it actively manufactured the insurgency it sought to destroy.

Narrator: When the Taliban regime crumbled in late 2001, it seemed like a decisive victory and a fresh start for Afghanistan. But the idea of "Year Zero" was an illusion. The Taliban's fall was not just a result of American airpower; it was also an implosion from within. Many Taliban fighters were not fanatics, but pragmatic men who had joined a movement that promised to end the horrific chaos of the post-Soviet civil war.

This is seen through the eyes of a commander the book calls Mullah Cable. He was a ruthless police chief who found purpose in the Taliban’s restoration of order. But when the US invasion began, he watched from a mountainside as an American jet dropped bombs that vaporized his friends in seconds. Stunned by this invisible, merciless power, and disgusted by his leader Mullah Omar’s calls for martyrdom from a hiding place, Mullah Cable made a simple choice. He told his men, "Go home," and he walked away from the war, hoping to become a civilian forever. He was not alone. Thousands of Taliban fighters simply melted back into their villages, hoping for peace. This reveals a crucial truth: the Taliban was not a monolithic force of ideologues, but a complex coalition, many of whom were willing to accept the new order. The failure to understand this would have catastrophic consequences.

Narrator: In the early days of the war, the US military needed local allies and intelligence to hunt for Al-Qaeda. This created a perverse and deadly market. Ambitious warlords and strongmen realized they could gain immense power, money, and American firepower by simply labeling their personal or tribal rivals as "Taliban."

The tragic story of Hajji Burget Khan in Maiwand district is a perfect example. Burget Khan was a revered, pro-American elder who had organized his community to support the new Karzai government. He was even elected as a delegate to the national council. But his popularity was a threat to Gul Agha Sherzai, the corrupt US-backed governor of Kandahar. Sherzai’s network fed false intelligence to the Americans, and one night in May 2002, US forces raided Burget Khan’s compound. They killed the elderly leader, beat and captured 54 other men from the village, and humiliated the women by shackling them and herding them into a dry well—a profound violation of Pashtun honor.

The captured men, who were staunchly pro-American, were taken to a US base, stripped naked, and had their beards shorn. When they were finally released, their initial hope in America had curdled into a burning desire for revenge. An entire community that had been an ally was transformed into an enemy overnight. This pattern was repeated across the south, as the US, blind to local politics, became a weapon for hire in tribal feuds, systematically dismantling its own support base and creating a deep well of resentment that the resurgent Taliban could easily tap into.

Narrator: Why did men like Mullah Cable, who had desperately wanted to leave the war behind, end up rejoining the Taliban? The book shows that the primary driver was not ideology, but the failures of the new Afghan state. After his escape, Mullah Cable—now going by his real name, Akbar Gul—tried to build an honest life. He returned to Afghanistan, moved to his ancestral village, and became a successful cell phone repairman. He embraced the new opportunities and initially believed the Americans might bring stability.

But this hope was crushed by the new Afghan National Police, who were often just rebranded militiamen from the civil war. They began extorting money from his shop. When he refused to pay, they beat him and destroyed his stall. He watched as they preyed on his community, shaking people down and committing horrific abuses with impunity. After his livelihood was destroyed, an old Taliban comrade called him and asked, "You know the situation. What do you want to do about it?" For Akbar Gul, the choice was clear. The government he had tried to believe in was more predatory than the one it replaced. Fighting was the only option left. His story shows that the Taliban insurgency was resurrected not by fanatics in caves, but by ordinary people pushed to the breaking point by corruption and injustice.

Narrator: As the war progressed, the US became trapped in a paradox. To secure its supply lines and fight the Taliban, it relied on a new generation of ruthless strongmen. The most powerful of these was Matiullah Khan, an illiterate former taxi driver who controlled the vital highway from Kandahar to the main US base in Uruzgan. The road was so dangerous that it was littered with the charred remains of supply trucks.

Matiullah created a private army and turned the highway into a multi-million-dollar protection racket. He charged NATO contractors up to $2,000 per truck for safe passage. He enforced his monopoly with brutal violence, but he got the job done. The supplies got through. The US military, prioritizing logistics over principles, made him a key partner, effectively paying him to control the region. This meant that US taxpayer money was funding a warlord who ruled through fear and was widely believed to be paying off certain Taliban commanders to keep his convoys safe. This system, replicated across the country, ensured that true state-building was impossible. Instead of a stable democracy, America’s presence fostered a landscape of powerful, corrupt warlords who were dependent on the conflict for their wealth and power.

Narrator: Beyond the soldiers and warlords, the war was a daily struggle for survival for millions of civilians. This is powerfully illustrated through the life of Heela, a village housewife. An educated woman from Kabul, she was forced into a conservative rural life by the civil war. After the US invasion, her husband, Musqinyar, embraced the new era, only to be murdered by corrupt local officials.

As a widow, Heela was plunged into a world of extreme vulnerability, facing poverty, social isolation, and the threat of exploitation. Yet, through sheer resilience, she navigated this treacherous world. She found work, faced down threats from the Taliban, and sought protection from the powerful Matiullah Khan. Her journey culminates in a run for political office, and she eventually becomes a senator. Her story is one of incredible personal agency. However, it also underscores the book’s central theme. For Heela and countless others, the grand ideas of democracy or jihad were distant abstractions. The real war was the daily fight to feed their children, to stay safe, and to endure. Her triumph was not political, but personal. It was the triumph of survival.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from No Good Men Among the Living is that America’s war in Afghanistan was lost not on the battlefield, but in the villages. It was lost the moment the US chose to see the world in black-and-white categories of "ally" and "enemy," ignoring the complex, gray reality of Afghan life. By empowering the corrupt and alienating the hopeful, the US created a self-fulfilling prophecy, regenerating the very insurgency it had come to defeat.

The book leaves us with a profound and challenging thought, best captured in the author’s final reflection. In a war like this, victory is not about planting flags or promoting ideologies. It is about the stubborn, human act of resisting the categories chosen for you. To win was simply to plan a future while knowing it could all be over in an instant; to comfort your children when the air outside throbs in the night; to go to a wedding and return to tell about it. To win was to survive. The most pressing question the book asks is not who won the war, but what happens to a country when, for decades, mere survival is the only victory possible.